The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Mike Ashley

  “Then a great fear began to grip my heart. I remember it came suddenly, in the very midst of the little feast we were having to celebrate the first year of our wedded life—our first anniversary. I realised that soon, in the very joy of our honeymoon I must anticipate our separation—the wedding would take place, next we would be engaged, then mere acquaintances, and, after that—oh, desolation—it would be before I met her, and I should never see her again. I lived that year, our second honeymoon, and the last of our life together, torn between the joy of my returned happiness and the terrible knowledge of my coming loss. The wedding day came and I could have cried out in my agony, but I could give my pain no voice. I had no tears, only smiles and laughter that must be gone through with, though my heart was breaking. Imagine it if you can, sirs. Was ever a man so tried?

  “Then came the period of our engagement, when I knew we were drifting slowly and surely apart—and the happiness and misery of that time was, perhaps, the hardest of all to bear, even worse than the actual slow separation, though after my declaration, when our relations were formal and distant, it broke my heart to see her, whom I had loved so long, treat me as a mere acquaintance; and with it was the awful knowledge that there was no future hope, no possibility of our meeting—on this earth at least.

  “The poignant day of my first meeting with her arrived at last. I saw her, as I had seen her then, so many years before, lighting that conventional ballroom with her presence, a radiant vision, all gold and rose, her tall, graceful figure gowned in soft, filmy drapery. I saw her with all my heart and soul, with all the pent-up memories of my twice-lived life, for I remembered it was the first, and I knew it was the last time I should see her. She vanished and I was left alone. For some time afterwards, although I was living over my cheerful, happy-go-lucky bachelor days, I was internally of a suicidal turn of mind, even on my return journeys in the East. I could not resign myself to losing this girl that, according to reversed time, I had never met. But youth is gay, and its recuperative powers strong, and I am growing steadily younger, you see. Then, too, other loves came and went, or rather went and came, and in spite of myself I am able to contemplate my double past with the buoyancy of my second youth.

  “Yet it is all very strange, and recently unaccountable intervals have intruded into my life, such as this evening, for instance. You, gentlemen, are not a part of my boyish past, and yet you seem to be interpolated into my otherwise coherently backward existence. This has been happening for some time, and grows more marked. You may be dreams of my old life that I had forgotten, but I am at a loss to account for it fully. For instance—how could I have foretold then what the future had in store? And yet, in one sense that is what I am doing now, in telling you of my experience. You must admit that it is confusing.”

  Gage’s story had fairly made me dizzy. I admitted that it was confusing. I hardly knew what to think. I even turned an anxious eye on the clock over the fireplace to assure myself that its hands still moved from left to right. As I faced it, Lamison regarded me with his amused but sympathetic eye.

  “I hope to interpolate myself a great deal into your world, Gage,” he said. “It’s time you stopped in your mad career of growing younger. I don’t want you on my hands when you become a troublesome stripling, or even when you have to unlearn your college education.”

  Gage laughed. “It will be rather hard, but I did enjoy my Harvard days, before I had that row with the family. Whew! How the old man did blow me up! And when I think I have to hear all that over again, it makes me sick.”

  He paused again and assisted his courage from the cheering pitcher.

  “Another thing that worries me,” he went on, “is this: Have you noticed that although all the happenings of my life seem to follow in well ordered reverse sequence, what I say does not? For instance, by all rights I should repeat my sentences verbatim backwards. ‘I am glad to see you,’ in reversed language would be, ‘You see to glad am I.’ Now, in all my years of reversed experiences, although the order of conversation progresses backwards, the sentences themselves make perfect forward sense. This drives me to distraction.”

  The whole impossible proposition danced before me, but Lamison was evidently delighted.

  “Good, Gage, splendid! You are making progress—your logic is returning. I am unspeakably glad.”

  Gage looked at him wonderingly, “Why should you? It is only more confusing. Ah, well. I should not be unhappy if it were not the awful prospect of being a baby again. That revolts me, like becoming senile. It is such a horrible thing to become a squirming. senseless infant—it makes me shiver; it keeps me from sleeping, it is a menace too ugly and loathsome to be endured. Fancy it, gentlemen, the ignominy of it—the hideous helplessness.”

  “We’ll find a way to prevent that,” Lamison said soothingly. “You are better already. It won’t be long before we set it all straight. Come, come, be a man—” for Gage suddenly flung himself on the table, his face buried in his hands, moaning slowly, “I don’t want to be a baby—I don’t want to be a baby.”

  This exhibition was so pitiful that I turned to Lamison, almost with tears in my eyes. “Is there any hope for him?” I asked.

  Lamison nodded. “Yes, he’ll pull through. A condition brought on by overwork and the sudden death of his wife, of whom he was devotedly fond. You see how he is beginning to realise the discrepancies of his imaginary life. He will come out all right—in time.”

  Gage now had himself under control and sat up shamefacedly. “Don’t mind me, Mr Robertson,” he said. “I don’t often break down this way, and I wouldn’t have you imagine for one instant that I regret my life. I could not have asked a greater boon of Fate than those happy years restored to me, when time had turned.”

  He rose gravely, excused himself, and left us, and we sat silent and deeply thoughtful, staring into the red embers of the fire.

  THE PAINTER OF DEAD WOMEN

  Edna W. Underwood (1873–1961)

  The following is usually regarded as a horror story, inasmuch as it is remembered at all. But it is based on a central scientific idea—that of suspended animation. The idea that you might fall into a coma and sleep for decades, even centuries, had long been a literary device, best known from Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), and Mary Griffith had used it as a way to travel to her future utopia in Three Hundred Years Hence (1836). In these and other stories, though, no explanation was given for the prolonged sleep. The growth in the use of anaesthetics provided a scientific basis and steadily authors adopted the idea of the use of drugs to prolong sleep, as H. G. Wells did in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). However, in the following story the idea is that the sleeper doesn’t wake, that the body is somehow preserved in a comatose state, with the mind still functioning! That’s why it’s treated as a horror story.

  Edna Worthley was born in Maine, but settled in New York after her marriage in 1897 to jeweller Earl Underwood. It was the atmosphere of New York that spurred her into writing, but it was a while before any of her work was published other than a translation from the Russian of a work by Nikolai Gogol in 1903. But by the end of that decade she had enough short stories to assemble a volume, A Book of Dear Dead Women, published in 1911 by Little, Brown of Boston. Curiously, apart from one further novelette, ‘An Orchid of Asia’ (1920), Underwood wrote no more short stories. She turned instead to poetry and then novels, her books reflecting her passion for Russian literature and history.

  A Book of Dear Dead Women is unusual in that its author reflected upon the possibility that various scientific breakthroughs had been made in the early Renaissance but subsequently lost or kept secret. Another story, “The Mirror of La Granja” suggests that a medieval chemist had created a glass that could trap the essence of the human spirit. It was perhaps a loss to the early years of science fiction that Underwood was drawn away to her other interests as who knows what else she might have imagined.

  WE WERE LINGERING over one of our honeymoon breakfast
s in Naples, my husband dividing his attention between Il Corriere di Napoli and his coffee, and I planning for my favorite pastime, swimming, in that sea which looks like a liquid sapphire.

  “ ‘No clue to the mysterious disappearance of the Contessa Fabriani,’ ” he read. “ ‘After a month’s search, the police are baffled.’ ”

  “That does not sound particularly remarkable to you, I suppose. Women and men, too, for that matter have disappeared from other cities. But this adds another chapter to a mysterious story of crime. For twenty-five years not only native Italian women, but visiting women of other nations have disappeared from Naples, and nothing has afterward been heard of them. The peculiar part about it is that they have all been young and beautiful, and women of the upper class.”

  I paid little heed to his words. I was thinking of other things. Besides, Luigi was a Neapolitan and interested in all the happenings of his native city. On my first visit to Naples I did not have time to interest myself in a sensational story such as I could read any morning in the London papers.

  “You have not forgotten that to-night is the ball?” said my husband, consulting his watch and jumping up. “I want you to look particularly lovely. All my friends and your old rivals will be there. Business takes me from the city for the day, and in case I should not return in time to accompany you, I have arranged for Cousin Lucia to meet you at ten at the door of the Cinascalchi Palace. I shall come later in time for part of the dancing. Tell Pietro to get you there at exactly ten,” he called, after he had kissed me good-bye.

  When I took a last look at myself in the glass that night, I felt that I had obeyed my husband’s instructions. I was looking particularly lovely. I had dressed with the purpose of appearing as unlike Italian women as possible.

  My slim six feet of stature was arrayed in a plain white satin princess, from which the shoulders rose scarcely less white and satiny. My hair was the color of the upland furze, and my cheeks glowed like the roses of an English garden.

  “Pietro!” I called, after we had driven what seemed to me a very long time. “Are you sure that you are going in the right direction? I did not suppose that it was outside the city.” He reassured me and drove on.

  We entered the courtyard of a country estate. As I stepped from the carriage, I saw in the distance the grouped lights of Naples. Pietro whipped the horses and drove off before I had time to speak.

  There were no other carriages in the yard. Could I have mistaken the time? Lucia was not there to meet me, either. “She is probably within,” I reflected, “since the palace is bright with light.”

  Doors swung back softly and, as if by magic, I entered. The blaze of light that rushed out all but blinded me. Words cannot express the horror of it nor the silence that accompanied it. There were no servants moving about. No one was in sight. I was alone.

  Imagine a sweep of majestic rooms whose floors were polished to the surface consistency of stone; straight white walls of mirrored marble, and, blazing from walls and ceiling, prisms of cut crystal. Wherever you looked the glitter of light flashed back at you, confusing your eyes and dazing your brain. I did not suppose that light could hold such terror.

  “There is surely some mistake,” I whispered. “This is no place for dancing or merriment. It is more like a white and shining sepulchre. I would rather trust myself to the night outside,” and I turned toward the door with the purpose of leaving. But the space behind, where I knew that I had entered, presented a smooth and evenly paneled surface. There was no door. Nor was there place for lock or knob. As I stood confused and hesitating, I learned to the full the demoniac power of light. The slightest motion of my body, my head, my breathing, even, sent from polished corners and cornice quivering arrows into my eyes. The mirrors and the shining marble reflected floor and ceiling until it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. It seemed, after a time, that I was floating head downward in a sea of light.

  Then something righted me sharply. It was not sound nor was it thought. It appealed to subtler senses. It was as if the material body was endowed with a thinking machine and each pore contained a brain. It aroused some consciousness which the hypnotism of light had dulled. I knew then that I was standing, slim and white and frozen with terror, in the focus of the light.

  I felt the cold diamonds shift their position upon my throat and breast and tremble as I breathed irregularly. I heard the sibilant slipping of the stiff satin as it fell into a changed position.

  A powerful and dominant brain had touched my own. For one unconscious moment it had ruled it and set upon it the seal of its thought.

  Such a passion of fear assailed me that it seemed as if I must choke. My fascinated eyes turned toward the end of the farthest room. From there the message came. There, I knew, was something compelling, something electric. Exactly in the center of that far room, and very erect, stood a man. He was coming toward me, too, slowly very slowly. Yet I heard not the slightest sound. Evidently he was shod with rubber. He moved as I have seen a malevolent spider move toward a prisoned fly, enjoying the pleasure of motion because he knows that there is no escape for his victim. Just as gracefully and easily did he move toward me. And as he came, I knew that he read my soul, measured my strength and my power of resistance, and at the same time admired the white erectness of my body.

  Fear, as with a bitter acid, etched his picture on my brain. He was very tall, taller than I by a good inch and faultlessly attired; a patrician, but a degenerate patrician, the body alone having preserved its ancient dignity.

  Ribboned decorations brightened his coat, and I saw a garter on his leg.

  He was thinner than any one I ever saw and correspondingly supple. His movements had the fascination of a serpent. Thus might a serpent move, if its coiled length were poised erect.

  His head would have been beautiful, had not the features been so delicately chiseled that strength and nobility had been refined away, and in their place had come effeminacy and a certain cold and delicate cruelty.

  He was an old man, too, and his heavy hair was white. His brows, however, were black and youthful, and from beneath looked out blue eyes. The eyes were the color of light when it shines through thick ice. They were the color of the sharp edge of fine steel when it is bared too quickly to the sun. In the same hard way the light ran across them.

  But the strangest part was that there seemed to be no limit to their depth. However far you looked within, you could not find a person. You could not surprise a consciousness. There was no soul there. In its stead there was merely a keen and destructive intelligence.

  I realized that the man coming toward me did not live by means of the physical acts of life. He had learned to live by his brain. He was a cerebral!

  I sensed his dominant personality and struggled against it. I sensed, too, the presence of a numbing mental fluid that crippled my will and dulled me as does that sweet-smelling death which surgeons call the ansesthetic.

  He had stripped himself of human attributes. He knew nothing of fear, pity, love.

  “I have the honor of meeting, I believe, the bride of the Leopardi.” He bowed and spoke in an even, unemotional voice.

  I bowed in return. “How is it possible for you to know that? I do not remember having met you.”

  “It is not necessary to have met me. No beautiful woman comes to Naples whom I do not know. I,” bowing again, “am Count Ponte-leone, painter of dead women. You have probably heard of me.”

  “Who has not!” I exclaimed, somewhat reassured and wondering that this could be the man whose name was resounding through two continents.

  “This intrusion which I beg you to pardon is due to the coachman’s mistake. I am expected at the Cinascalchi ball. My husband and cousin await me there. If you will send me on in your carriage, I shall be grateful.”

  “Oh, no, your coachman made no mistake,” calmly ignoring my request. “I brought him here and you, too, as I have brought other women by this,” tapping his forehead.


  “You are graciously jesting to excuse my rudeness,” I managed to stammer, summoning the ghost of a smile.

  “Well, we may as well call it a jest if you wish. It is a jest which ought to flatter. I entertain only beautiful women here.”

  The glance that accompanied this enveloped me from head to foot. It was a glance of admiration, and yet in it there was none of the desire of would-be love. It was devoid of warmth and emotion. Nothing could be more impersonal. No mark of material beauty had escaped it. It was the trained glance of a connoisseur which measures accurately. I might have been a picture or a piece of furniture.

  I felt that he knew my racial standing, my rank as a human animal, by the delicate roundness of my bones and the fine fiber of my flesh. I had been as glass to his intelligent gaze. Somehow, then, I felt that the body of me belonged to him because of this masterly penetration which substance could not resist.

  “Since you are to be my guest, we might seek a more comfortable place to converse.”

  He led the way to the center of the great rooms where, touching an invisible spring, doors flew back, disclosing a drawing-room draped in red. As he bowed me to a seat, he remarked: “Here you look like a pearl dropped in a cup of blood.”

  I, too, thought that I had never seen so wicked a red nor one so suggestive of luxurious crime. The comparison jarred upon me and prickled me with fear.